Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

BLAKE, THE WORDSWORTHS, AND THE DUNG 35

None of the Romantics matched Blake for fervor. Coming on Wordsworth’s
perceptive but pedestrian lines—

How exquisitely the individual Mind

... to the external World
Is fitted—and how exquisitely, too—...
The external World is fitted to the Mind

—he scribbled in the margin: “You shall not bring me down to believe such
fitting & fitted. I know better & please your Lordship.” No such passive way
of seeing things interested Blake. “Bring me my Bow of burning gold: / Bring
me my Arrows of desire: / Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! / Bring me
my Chariot of Fire.”
Yet William Wordsworth himself (1770–1850) had “dizzy raptures”:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.

His sister Dorothy says that “While I was getting into bed” one night, he com-
posed “Tintern Abbey.”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light.

Since childhood, the “visionary gleam” has “fled.” Even his famous daffodils,
“Tossing their heads” beside the dancing waves, dance in the past tense. “When
on the couch I lie /... They flash upon that inward eye.”
Those daffodils and Wordsworth’s stardom look slightly different in light of
the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855), whom William called

thou my dearest friend,

My dear, dear friend; and in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasures in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes.

She did have a fine eye and a marvelous pen too, recording their life in England ’s
semi-wild Lake District. Dorothy writes on April 15, 1802: “When we were in
the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils... But as we went
along there were more and yet more... I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They
grew among the mossy stones about and about them; some rested their heads
upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled
and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon
them over the lake.” (plate 4)